mobilelinks, a Swedish provider of media network services, recently received delivery of its AFIBER media transport network consisting of 3 nodes in Amsterdam and Hilversum, connected by wavelength connections over distinct geographic routes.
To serve its customer base, mobilelinks operates a network across locations in northern Europe with connections to major pops in London, Frankfurt and Warsaw. Its projects include network connectivity for high-profile events like the UEFA Champions League and Europa League football matches, FIS Ski events, the IIHF Ice Hockey World Championship and World Figure Skating Championship.
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The latest mobilelinks project is for the Viaplay expansion of the Nordic Entertainment Group (NENT Group) to The Netherlands. As mentioned on the NENT website: “Viaplay will become the exclusive Dutch home of Formula 1® in a three-year deal to 2024 and Bundesliga football until 2029, and will offer viewers a unique combination of premium live sports, Viaplay Originals, international films and series, and kids content.”
To enable Viaplay in its new region, media traffic will need to be transported back and forth from NENT’s media broadcast location in Stockholm, a Hilversum production location, and the NEP LiveCenter in Hilversum.
Typically, raw media streams arrive by fiber or satellite networks into Stockholm, and then get sent to the respective European regions for the addition of region-specific components of the program at hand (local studio, commentary in local language, etc.). Once complete, the content is sent back to Stockholm for distribution to viewer end points. A significant amount of this traffic will be for live broadcasts; therefore the network needs to be bullet proof and ensure viewers are not affected by equipment, data center or fiber route outages.
mobilelinks approached AFIBER to find a network solution for its challenging requirements including high availability, stable throughput at full load with fixed latencies, and so called “transparency” for the protocols that the specific mobilelinks network equipment employs. To make things even more challenging, a delivery date before the start of the racing season in March was a non-negotiable demand, certainly now Max Verstappen starts his title-defending season!
By exploiting its existing transport network creatively, AFIBER added the NEP Data Hotel to the mobilelinks network using two diverse building entries. Third party fiber routes from multiple providers were sourced to connect the Hilversum production location into the ring. With this approach there was no need for significant fiber construction work. Special care was taken to use fully distinct fiber routes to core nodes, and to employ separate equipment in separate locations for all transport routes. This means that even if an AFIBER core node in a data center location were to be taken out by a catastrophe, the media transport will remain intact over a completely separate link.
Less impacting failures of network components also need to be identified and resolved swiftly, as a combination of small failures may still take a network down. To achieve this, AFIBER monitors all its network equipment to the level of the individual components of a customer connection. Fiber routes are monitored using separate monitoring equipment that discovers fiber manipulation, its degradation over time and pinpoints the location of fiber cuts. This ensures that a failure is pinpointed specifically to the failing network element and its location remotely and swiftly without testing on site.
By planning the implementation carefully and continued focus from AFIBER and its sourcing partners during the implementation, AFIBER completed the delivery of the mobilelinks network in The Netherlands without delay. After assisting the mobilelinks network engineers with their acceptance and commissioning steps, the network was ready for production in time for the racing season!
Andreas Langell, CEO of mobilelinks: “For this project we followed the demands of our client to outside our core region and into The Netherlands. This means forging new partnerships and taking calculated leaps of faith in new partners. AFIBER were very convincing with their responsiveness and resolution, both in the robustness of their design and their confidence to hit the big delivery date. I never experienced much stress about it as they kept me updated on the progress and watch points of the network delivery plan. When we received our network for production, their delivery and engineering people remained very approachable to help solve a few remaining gremlins. Great job!”
AFIBER would like to express our gratitude to NEP, BlackGATE and Verizon Business Solutions for their responsiveness and focus on a timely delivery throughout the project.
AFIBER designs, delivers and manages optical transport networks in The Netherlands. Please contact us at sales@afiber.net or +31 20 22 500 25 to discuss your requirements!
About AFIBER
AFIBER is an independent provider of fiber optic connectivity for business customers and service providers. We help organizations with the delivery and management of high-quality networks between branches, data centers, cloud providers, and providers of network and IT services.
AFIBER offers business customers fiber optic coverage in a large part of the Netherlands. This fiber optic network is connected to the main data centers and various regional and national fiber optic networks. This enables us to make an independent choice for our customers for the right connectivity for your company network.
